Since returning from Burning Man I began editing my 4Play piece that I shot in July, featuring one of UK’s most talked about upcoming artists, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs.

I spent 4 days with Orlando, first at his home in Oxford, and then on the road going from London to Dour (Belgium) and then to Berlin, capturing the happenings around two of his gigs, one of which was at Melt Festival.

Working with someone with such true talent and with so much to say made things very easy for me. I find that most docos on musicians and performers today are a bit contrived, simply because being an artist and generating hype has become so easy and widespread, most of the time you find yourself watching an overly elaborate story that is trying to make someone average appear to be above-average.

TEED however doesn’t fit into this category, having grown up in a family of classical musicians, touring in a renowned choir from the age of 7, being multi instrumentalist, knocking up jungle/jazz beats from the age of 13 on Reason, and now producing a wide range of dance music that no-one knows how to categorize, and being able to turn a tent full of hundreds of bored people into a mass of roaring energy that sends people into bliss (or tears). On top of that he is someone who’s pretty opinionated on the state of dance music, and presents his ideas eloquently without sounding like a knob, for the lack of a better expression.

That said, I found myself struggling to cram all of this into an 11 minute edit. On top of his quotes I had to feature his music, his performances, his dinosaur costumes, the dancers, the crowds. It became clear straight away that this was meant to be a much longer documentary. I had to cut so many golden moments out of this, and had to cut down on my usual experimental moments in favour of maintaining the story line which was just overflowing. I played around a little bit with the audio, working on the flow of his music, going from one track to another. Orlando sent me the stems for a few of his tracks and I was able to use some of them to create an abstract backbone of his music.

This was a FALKOHAUS production, my new company together with Corvin Dhali, who came with me on the trip and helped out immensely. I wouldn’t have been able to make the edit in time for the deadline if it wasn’t for the help of Bryan Cosgrove, who has been working with me for the past couple of months.

Broadcast on 21st October at 1:15 AM (Thursday night), on Channel 4.